Jodhaa Akbar appreciation post
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While rewatching Jodhaa Akbar, I found myself particularly intrigued by the character of Nimat. Nimat, a man dressed in women’s clothing and included in the female royal company, initially caught my attention. After some research, I learned that Nimat represented a hijra, a term for a South Asian gender identity that defies the Western binary of male and female. What struck me most about Nimat’s portrayal was how the character simultaneously embodied both "masculine" and "feminine" traits. In one scene, Nimat gossiped with the women, while in another, they were wearing a war armor while accompanying the princess. This fluidity in gender presentation stood out to me, especially in the context of the Mughal Empire—a Muslim society. This got me thinking about how our understanding of masculinity can differ drastically depending on cultural context. In the West, masculinity is often framed in strict, binary terms, where "masculine" traits are associated with power, strength, and rationality. Yet, this Westernized view of masculinity is not universal. In South Asian and Muslim cultures, for example, interpretations of masculinity can be much more nuanced, and expressions of gender may not fit neatly into the Western mold. This cultural diversity is often overlooked or dismissed in the broader, global discourse around gender and sexuality. In my own experience, what I have been taught to understand as "masculinity" is shaped by a specific cultural lens—one that may differ significantly from those of others. This dissonance is especially apparent when comparing Western concepts of masculinity to South Asian or Muslim masculinity, which complicates the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality intersect. Western constructions of masculinity often racialize South Asian men, framing them as embodiments of "deviant sexuality" or "dangerous" masculinity. In this view, the "Muslim-looking" subject is seen as a threat to normative gender roles, often associated with the figure of the "enemy combatant" and reinforcing stereotypes of South Asians as "perpetual foreigners". This racialized masculinity becomes irreconcilable with idealized notions of "American-ness"(Thangaraj, 375). When we consider the intersection of these racialized constructions of masculinity with queerness, the complexities deepen. Queer diasporic subjects, particularly South Asians in the U.S. after 9/11, navigate a fraught terrain where their queerness is simultaneously marked as "too deviant" and yet, at times, fetishized (Puar, 173). Queer South Asians may find themselves caught in a double bind: they are marked by their racial identity and simultaneously associated with the same "perverse" sexuality that makes them almost too queer to be redeemed (Puar, 170). Thus, the intersections of masculinity, race, and sexuality in the diasporic context of South Asian and Muslim identities create a powerful lens for interrogating how Western ideals of gender and sexuality have come to dominate global discourse. Masculinity, as we understand it in the West, is often framed in opposition to forms of masculinity that do not fit neatly into this paradigm—particularly in non-Western, racialized, and queer contexts. The marginalization of these alternative masculinities, along with the way in which they are often viewed through a lens of queerness, speaks to broader processes of cultural hegemony and the policing of gender and sexual identities in contemporary society.